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A MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNEk. 



DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED AT THE 



PARKER MEMORIAL MEETING-HOUSE. 



®wtttg-#wjfttft ®im%u0hwl f ocictn, 



OF 1! OS TON, 



ON SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 18 74. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



BOSTON : 

A. WILLIAMS & CO. 

1874. 



A MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNLR. 



DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED AT THE 



PARKER MEMORIAL MEETING-HOUSE, 



®w*tttg#ightb $0ugMptt0ttal $ mt% 



OF BOSTON, 



ON SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 1874. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



BOSTON : 
A. WILLIAMS & CO. 

1874. 



E4I5" 

.%■■ 



COCHRANE & SAMPSON, PRINTERS, 
No. 9 Bromfield Street. 

/ c 



DISCOURSE. 



We are gathered within the shadow of a great national be- 
reavement ; — shall I not say the greatest that the genera- 
tions of Americans now on the fields of active duty have known 
or can know ? Not less than this the tribute I am impelled to 
render him for whom we mourn, when I recollect what he has 
done for us during thirty years of the most critical struggle 
through which a nation can pass ; and when I think of his func- 
tion of standing in the confidence of good men, as their guaran- 
tor of an unimpeachable integrity and vigilance in the front of 
all our public perils ; his name a watchword of their faith in 
political virtue, in the rights and duties of the citizen, in the 
destiny of the state. This is the service a republic can least 
afford to lose ; of this we can never have enough ; and so rare 
and so grand is it, the slow fruit of such tried fidelity and such 
martyr virtues, that we almost forget, in our utter inability to 
replace it, the right it has to be gathered up, when its physical 
forces have been spent for our good, into the life of spiritual 
benediction wherein a nation's gratitude must enshrine the 
virtue that never could deceive its trust. 

" Shall not all good things await 
Him who cared not to be great 
But as he served or saved the state ? " 

How rounded and finished, like one of his own regal argu- 
ments for human rights, was this long and stately career! What 



full deliverance of his divine message ; what equal response of 
public admiration and love ; what efficiency in every stroke for 
principles, telling on the civilized world ; what happy fortune, 
to close his mortal eyes on the crowning steps of justice to the 
cause his whole life has pursued ! The eloquent voice, whose 
protest and pleading has made the years of our public trials so 
grand, is for us, alas ! forever stilled ; but it could commit with 
its last accents, to a people whose gratitude must surely hasten 
to fulfill the trust, that charter of civil rights that shall com- 
plete his dearest task. His noble ambition to initiate every step 
in the political evolution of the Anti-slavery Idea, had achieved a 
success it is no detraction from the claims of other statesmen 
to say was not far from absolute. This clear sight, somewhat 
darkened, as it seemed now and then, of late, by the pressure of 
infirmities incurred and borne in the nation's service, has already 
won the tribute of a better comprehension of the grounds of its 
choice ; and Massachusetts rejoices with unspeakable joy to-day 
that his eyes were cheered by full atonement for her one harsh 
and hasty censure on his motives and aims. The barbarous 
blows struck at freedom over his defenseless head did not 
quench the sacred fire whose work was not yet done. What 
heroic toil struggled with their burden of martyr-pains, till every 
effort warned that it was time to rest! And we who feel how 
they have reached down through all these years to strike at our 
hearts in this supreme sorrow can remember also how impotent 
they were to harm, how potent to serve, the purpose and the 
lame we love. He had gathered up the long scries of his public 
utterances, the soul of the political history of his time, to their 
latesl and shaped it to the full realization of Milton's 

i hook is the precious life-blood of a master 
spirit, embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life." 

Wi >s were possible than this, or in a greatei 

path ? What happier lot than such a record, such a lame ; pass- 



ing into the souls of a great people, as they gather, the humblest 
of them the most bereft, about his silent dust ! 

But his best achievement is precisely that which makes the 
keenness of our grief, and fills us with the sense of an irrepar- 
able loss. He who shows what a throne of instant power in a 
throneless land a stainless reputation may be; he who is a living 
root within it of that faith in the reality of political virtue which 
neutralizes the effect of countless treacheries and corruptions, so 
that citizens can still strive with heart and hope for self-govern- 
ment as the truth of the coming time, — is doing for us every day 
more than any special cause he pleads. To generate such con- 
fidence is the highest form of productive force. And it is the 
soul of political education to learn how to estimate this supreme 
form of credit, on which all material values rest ; to appreciate 
it as the sheet-anchor of all public hope ; the enforcer and up- 
holder of every ideal aim. 

" Of all loves," it was said of old, " that is the strongest and 
divinest which is by cities and states borne to a man for his vir- 
tue." And the purity of our Senator, so conspicuous and so well 
tried, had become proverbial ; an organic part of the national 
faith ever springing in our thought and to our lips as a com- 
mon instinct and accepted fact ; so as ever to recall a record in 
the history of that Greek virtue he so loved to dwell on ; — that 
when, in the theatre, /Eschylus read his verses on Amphiaraus, 

beginning, 

" He would not seem, but be the best," 

all eyes turned on Aristides. Here was a great self-esteem that 
was so at one with self-respect that it became a function of the 
public estimation, and a ground of public faith. And in days 
when ability to sift out the worship of duty from the worship of 
self is the rarest of gifts, as it is the most momentous of needs, 
here was unmistakably the public manhood that could say with 
Algernon Sidney: — "! will live no longer than my principles will 



6 

preserve me. I will not blot my past by providing for my 
future. I live by just means or not at all." Here, amidst the 
subservience to public counts and party gauges, to mass and 
machinery, that is eating like a leprous taint through republican 
virtue, was the grand self-poise and self-reliance that all men 
most need to see. Here, amidst the extempore recklessness 
that degrades American speaking, was a conscientious and 
respectful labor of preparation that seemed to say with Demos- 
thenes: — "I should be ashamed to throw out what comes upper- 
most to an assembly like this." Here the scorn of intrigue, the 
contempt of covers and feints and crooked paths, the utter sin- 
cerity, the frank demand for all his conscience craved, the light- 
ning of righteous judgment that could not be stayed and that 
went straight to the mark, making dark plot and hidden peril a 
blaze of light before all eyes ! What can measure such a loss ? 
lie was the idealist among statesmen, and proved his ideal 
the only practicable path for the nation. He came, because 
policies were destroying us ; because the disease that corroded 
us was absence of faith in ideas, in principles, in moral power 
and in moral penalties. And he came armed for the task of 
affirming these sovereignties held to have no rights within the 
political sphere ; armed with qualities so accordant with it that 
they seemed given in him, once for all ; a self-sustainment tli.it 
could dispense with all the appliances on which politicians are 
wont to resl ; an absolutism that was proof against discourage- 
ment or opposing will ; a power of concentration on his work 
that protected him from much distraction and waste of time in 
ling to paltry talk and schemes ; a dignity and culture that 
liiiu tioiu those familiar approaches by the coarser kind ot 
politicians that bi ingling policies and the corruptions of 

onal subservience. He whose speech ran to elaboration and 
•-ion knew how and when to use sharpest brevity, and to 
all unbecoming application it was enough for him to answer. " It 



is illegal," or " It is unjust." An idealist, constituted for a cer- 
tain isolation which compelled attention and respect ; fitted to 
be the spokesman of a truth and a duty so much beyond the 
experience of most around him, that it must be uttered from the 
commanding elevation of a character which they not only could 
not hope to tamper with, but could not even conceive as walking 
on the same level with themselves. There are many who will call 
this " heresy to American democratic ideas." Whatever its 
heresy, it was necessary, and therefore it came in its hour ; and 
it is justified by its fruits. Nay, that the greatest Idea, which is 
culture and humanity combined in one, may be fully present on 
this field of strife, its master shall be as scholastic as he is brave ; 
while his eloquence shall use even a mechanical constructive- 
ness and often common-place minuteness, like a flaming sword 
that drives every syllable of their logic home to the simplest 
conscience and mind. 

The idealist of liberty, fully armed for her coming conflicts, 
and strengthening all good faith and purpose from the dear 
watch-tower of his integrity and vigilance, — this is the power we 
miss from our front, now in the very cleft of our perilous pas- 
sage from the consequences of civil war through the fiercer 
temptations of political corruption. How shall I express the 
sense of this Dead March in our hearts, this unspeakable loss ? 
I must touch it by contrasts. 

The martyrdom of John Brown, entering the deadly breach 
alone, with his thought, " I can best serve the cause of the slave 
by dying for -it," was not bereavement, but a sign in the heavens. 
Revealing every man to himself, dividing souls to right and left, 
dispelling all fictions with the godlike simplicity that fronted the 
question of liberty or death, it ushered in the new epoch, and 
forced the corrupt and faltering nation to meet the facts. The 
martyrdom of Lincoln, in the gulf between physical victory and 
political reaction, silenced the thanksgivings just parting from 



s 

its lips, in bewildered forebodings and awe-stricken prayers. The 
loss of this trusted leader, loyal where disloyalty would have 
been destruction, smote away the earth from under its feet. 
But the wiser minds felt that his work was done — to follow a 
path he had not known ; to fulfill a task he could not plan and 
knew hardly how to accept ; that his mission had been to ex- 
haust every device for reconciling the irreconcilable, till this 
aim was proved hopeless by his death-blow from that brutal 
power which regarded his tender lenience as little as it did the 
strict justice of Garrison and Brown. We learned to be thank- 
ful that he was not permitted to fulfill that plan of reconstruc- 
tion for reinstating the white aristocracy at the ballot-boxes of 
the South, without negro suffrage, which would most surely have 
brought us back again to the terrible scenes of the past ; thank- 
ful, too, for fresh warning of the depth of the old evil root whose 
bitterness we were yet to taste. So tempered was this bereave- 
ment of a good we had not long tasted, nor needed more. 

But the death of Charles Sumner, in the midst of great func- 
tions which his character and insight best fitted him to advance, 
which only bodily weakness impeded, and in an hour when the 
daily spectacle of such purity of life and purpose, such watchful- 
ness for justice, such ample resource, is demanded by most in- 
sidious dangers to private and public virtue, opens a void that 
teaches our saddened hearts how priceless was this constant 
blessing we have enjoyed so long. 'Tis the supplies of charac- 
ter that count ; honor, valor, faith in the best, are the daily food 
we live by. And what else is confessed by the momentary 
hush in this Babel of eager calumnies and selfish strifes, when 
the veiled fate that places us here and drops us out again, with- 
out regard to hopes or fe;irs, withdraws the great conscience 
whose presence was so productive of public confidence and pri- 
cheer? The swiftly-renewed applause for material values, 
the blind subservience to arts of cunning and strokes of power. 



which determine so much in the current estimates of national 
resource, will but make the sense of impoverishment more 
keen. 

But "man's needs are God's opportunity." The perils of 
the free state are attractions for the inward necessities 
and laws of freedom. Our great helpers die, and a new 
leaf seems turned. With every shock of loss we are changed. 
We cannot recall the mood nor the measure of our past. 
The sorrows of a short civil war turn us old, and our very 
memory seems vacant or decayed. The voices we hung on 
with joyful trust are silent, and the new tongues of a new 
day have effaced their tones. But how sacredly maintained, 
after all, is continuity — the sanity of nations as of minds, sacred 
in human affection, sacred in spiritual progress, in political evo- 
lution ! These rushing wheels of change bear within them- 
selves, and with us, the soul of all that made them swift messen- 
gers of good. The dying statesman commits to this unfailing 
conservation of all real forces what things he loves dearer than 
life — obeying the deep presentiment that holds his own part in 
their fate to be immortal ; — his love and reverence to the great 
living teacher of ideal principles to which the age is moving, 
and his cherished bill of civil rights to the friendly hands that 
are most fit and worthy to bear it on. And, whatever of change 
the one veil we cannot lift may bring to human personality, no 
visible outward presence could be more real than that power 
must remain which has made a memorial of its truth and love 
in every one of those steps of the nation for the last thirty years 
which are identified with the life of its sentiment and the move- 
ment of its growth. 

With what process of present or prospect of future good has 
not this wide-reaching man associated his career! Was it not 
his to bring up every broken thread, and see that no rightful 
step was wanting ; that we left no claim of humanity unrecpg- 



IO 

nized, no guaranty for liberties unsecured, no " task unac- 
cepted," no " footpath untrod"? Rights of labor, interests of 
art and science, guaranties of international justice, all elements 
of that "Grandeur of Nations" to which his youth had sum- 
moned the world, intellectual and moral culture, purification of 
political life, restraint on executive abuses, constitutional and 
civil amendment — all are to shine in their courses with the 
light of this broad statesmanship, open always to catch every 
whisper of the inspired conscience and humanity of the age. 
Nor do I believe he would have failed to welcome woman to 
every sphere, political or social, which she demands to fill. This 
is no blind admiration. I do not count his political wisdom in- 
fallible, nor the spirit in which he met injustice to himself always 
the highest. His secession from the only political nucleus, 
which at that moment could save us from a powerful party of 
reaction, only to form an ill-guarantied combination in its place, 
— however nobly meant, seemed to me untimely and dangerous. 
Nor could I wholly sympathize with his impeachment of Eng- 
land, both in respect of much that was asserted and much that 
was overlooked and left aside. But 1 doubt not that time will 
ever more and more fully vindicate in every step of his policy 
the complete integrity of his aim. 

The loss that sends us to our own resources, and disciplines 
the trust in leaders, even where it is best deserved, with admo- 
nitions to self-reliance, is the gain of new energies. It is well 
for a people that the master-spirit should have but his hour to 
work in. The lack of his guidance compels that inward freedom 
which not only opens clearer insight of his purpose, but is itself 
tin- citizen's indispensable culture in self-responsibility and self- 
command. So, only, comes the wisdom that can choose the 
the liberty that can recognize the free. Through no es- 
tablished mediator ran the new duties and demands be read ; 
facts be fronted through a leader's eyes. Me:;., 



II 

it is that every day brings its prophets, and that they are never 
to be foreseen. To the bereaved generations the earth seems 
verily to go down into the grave with their trusted deliverer ; 
its countenance is changed ; it is no more a home, but a sepul- 
chre. Yet to-morrow it is green with the wisdom and worth 
that are no echo of a past name, because they are products of 
an unprecedented spring. And, though they do not see the 
present through the traditions of past leaders, they do see those 
leaders more clearly and lovingly through their own free com- 
prehension of living tasks. 

It is too soon to say what we owe to the great life that has 
passed away. Yet its track lay in lines that are not easily mis- 
taken or overlooked. There are men whose power is in pure 
thought ; the generators of ideas, speakers to man's inner life, 
where world reformations begin in a mystic personal devotion to 
all-mastering intuitions, in the open sense of eternal beauty, 
truth and good. These our statesman could revere and love ; 
but his special victories lay not in their sphere. There are men 
whose power is in clear conscience and unconquerable will to 
insist on the realization of abstract right. Such were they who 
aroused the moral sentiment of the land against slavery and 
held the political world to all the responsibilities involved in 
the idea of freedom ; to the sacred logic of its duties and rights. 
The abolitionist drew the idea out of the depths of the soul, 
guarded its purity, and would not let it be bound by political al- 
ternatives, party interests, or respect for statute or constitution. 
These, too, our statesman honored, knowing well that their 
strenuous life was behind to upbear, and prompt, and urge him 
on. But his special sphere was to combine the Idea with definite 
legislation, to deal with it under the conditions of American 
politics, and one by one to enact its demands in the constitution 
and the laws. Thus he interpreted the constitution as essen- 
tially in its interest, and I doubt not, honestly. Yet but for the 



I 2 

■ protest against the constitution, its compromises 
would have made his work impossible. 

Who can fitly review these thirty years of absolute devotion 
to that race whom he began by pronouncing, with inspired in- 
sight, " the humblest, yet the grandest, figure in history" ? A 
ty which perceived and accepted the historic law, that post- 
- art, science, trade, political prosperity and even existence, 
to answer the cry of the oppressed ; to rescue the waif of ages, 
taken up, orphan of the human, into the heavenly love. It re- 
zed this puny child, this misshapen dwarf — the crushed 
faculty, the suppressed race — to be the giant whose body, 
striving to heave itself out of the dust, overturns civilizations 
and reconstructs ages ; whose simplicity, prostrate victim of 
wealth, and race, and religion, is lifted up to be their Saviour and 
their Judge. It saw that this justice which rules history had 
come to be the central fact of our age ; a duty enfolded in its 
demands for rights as the flower in the bud. How thoroughly 
was his hand its living index and instrument, as fearless as itself 
and as sure ; pointing its path through mazes of perplexity, of 
peril, of selfish compromise, of falsehood and of wrath ! Our 
memories recall the battlefields where he won the blessing of 
the oppressed and the homage of immortal years. How he 
turned the curses of the enemy into crowns of liberty! Texas 
admission, Nebraska fraud, Kansas barbarism, Crittenden com- 
promise, Seward delusion ; reluctance of the administration to 
arm the slave, to proclaim his freedom, to allow his capacity; 
it or balance emancipation by colonization. 
so that the servant we had cheated of his wages should be de- 
led ol hi . the presidential experiment of reinstating 
i ing free lorn <>\ debate, imposing terms of re- 
duction by the one-man power ; n of payment to the 
ition's duties to the freedmen ; of the 
n northern cities, — what heroic front 



13 

he made to all these foes ! How sublime that march of victory, 
which plants immortal growths and honors wherever his foot- 
steps trod ! And I point you to a greater achievement still. 

It is not to detract from the respect and gratitude due to 
President Lincoln that I emphasize the difference of .their 
principles, and note that the one was "Union with or without 
emancipation, but the Union at all events," and the other, " Sal- 
vation of the Union through justice to the slave." Let the 
memorial monuments say what they may, it was more due to 
Senator Sumner than to President Lincoln that the Edict of 
Emancipation came at last ; the fruit of his entreaties, of his 
undiscouraged, persistent will. What statesmanly wisdom in his 
initiation of a freedman's bureau ; of a constitutional amendment 
prohibiting slavery ; in his designation of the status of the re- 
bellion as territorial, and his plan of a territorial government for 
the South till right relations could be established between the 
races ; in his refusal to permit an amnesty to conquered traitors 
till the civil rights of negro loyalists were secured ! Nor can I fail 
to add his resistance to inflation of a depreciated currency ; to 
schemes of tampering with the public debt ; to every abuse of 
executive patronage by appointments that outraged the public 
sentiment or were purchased by subservience to private schemes ; 
to all prostitution of official power to the current jobbery and 
intrigue. 

It was his gift to see and his glory to represent that great 
central law of revolutions which impels them to concentrate 
about principles, as iron-filings obey the magnet held above 
them, that points their poles, and shapes their chaos to order 
and beauty and a common end. It was his to affirm from the 
start, against the political materialism in which slavery had 
trained the nation and its leaders, that the anti-slavery idea 
could by no possibility be the side-issue they believed it to be 
in this struggle, but was the awful magnet of God's instant law. 



14 

His to see and to make plain that, if in political arrangements 
there shall anywhere lurk' a lie against humanity, the progress of 
the strife will winnow it out as poison, with whatsoever by right 
adheres to it ; and that the statesman's patriotism is to ply 
this winnowing-fan of God till the mind of the state is made 
sane and its statutes pure to receive the whole wisdom of liberty 
and love. Not alone in this purpose, but pre-eminent among 
the chosen, its recognized centre, its illumined guide, its stead- 
fast beacon to a bewildered land, through the fierce struggle for 
mastery of her institutions, from its beginning on — not to its 
close, but to its entrance upon the new epoch which is to try 
them by the test if there be public virtue to preserve the hard- 
won safeguards, and unfold their greater meanings for the na- 
tion and the world. 

But his inestimable service is that he made the place of Sena- 
tor a matchless example of fitness to functions, of the right man 
in the right place. For we are passing through a time when 
political office seems to be 'little else than the opportunity for 
grasping and distributing personal spoil ; when whoso can by 
any means get, believes himself to have the right to take, the 
posts that are pregnant with a people's life or death ; when there 
is greater eagerness to put the mass-power of the ballot into 
every hand, however venal or debased, than will to see that it 
be wisely used ; when trusted men go down, shirking duties, 
failing at critical moments, ground between millstones of cun- 
ning demagogues, tools of destructive arts — not so much be- 
of evil will, as because out of their true place ; when the 
virtue that is the first test of fitness is scarcely looked at, and 
the disciplines of experience that should come next are utterly 
red ; when hordes of adventurers invade all functions, to 
with jugglers' knives over the naked heads of the people ; 
when the very power ol discerning qualification for public 
service is being swept away in mad competitions, and the whirl 



of rotation is destroying all motive for preparatory culture and 
all ground of public trust. Alas, the history of American states- 
manship of these past thirty years ! Is it not that sad parable 
of the guest without a wedding-garment, written out in full — 
with but here and there an exceptional space, like this wide one 
we recall to day — even down to the outer darkness of despair? 
Sometimes it has seemed the handwriting of doom upon our 
walls. The fatality of our statesmanship : " I have called you 
gods, but ye shall fall and die like one of the people ! " Has 
not the bane of the nation been the men that it has itself taken 
up and put where they do not by grace or by gift belong, to be 
thrown back on it in some penalty or other of misguided talent 
and broken faith ? Some Fugitive Slave Bill endorsed ; some 
" Fourth-of-March " sarcasm on justice and the Higher Law ; some 
reconstruction policy in the interest of rebellion ; some strange 
deflection of official power into forays of terrorism, and waste, 
and fraud ; the thumb of powerful personal interest turned this 
way or that, like the thumbs of the Roman populace, watching 
wretched gladiators in the Coliseum, to decide by that sign what 
functionary shall be spared or slain ! There is no root, of peril 
to be compared with our fatal delusion of supposing that office 
has some magic skill to bring out of its possessor something 
better than his own character or force ; of forgetting that we 
must be sternly judged by the weaknesses and vices we have 
lifted into seats that only statesmanship and virtue know how to 
fill. 

In such hours what a saving ideal have we had in the record 
that teaches what the post of Senator can be made to mean ! 
These ample resources of gift and culture, of statesman and 
scholar in one ; this transcendent sense of public duty ; this 
stainless virtue ; this transparent singleness of heart and aim ; 
this mastery of forces for their largest ends ; this dignity that 
ennobled the seat where a nation's sovereignty was enthroned ; 



i6 

this matchless accumulation of means for seconding the broad- 
leas ol the age ; this minute regard to every private inter- 
est and need ; in a word, this grand significance of function and 
fulfillment, is the treasure the nation assumes to-day. Dearer 
and holier its sublime rebuke, its severe exaction, its beautiful 
prompting, its vast historic scope, its inspiration of culture, its 
spiritual consecration of the political sphere, than any political 
promise, plan or path to which we can look. As it speaks from 
the vacant seat that has been his secular post of honor and suf- 
fering, and unremitting service, so it speaks from the mighty void 
now left within the nation's soul, where its work is to be an im- 
mortal education in whatever saves and adorns a state. In this 
hushed moment, when all hearts are made tender by the com- 
mon bereavement, do we not hear awakening preludes of an un- 
dying admiration and love ? 

We are entering on that great question of Labor, which is 
now to be what the Anti-Slavery question has hitherto been, — 
the school of our politics and trade, our morality and our faith. 
I hold it no slight part of the public service of Charles Sumner 
that he has stood, amidst the many narrow and exclusive notions 
that prevail as to the meaning and scope of labor, and the mis- 
chievous efforts of demagogues to create a strife of classes, — 
the living proof and enforcement of the following truth : It is 
not in any technical sense the " laboring man" who has sole or 
il light to public trusts, to control legislation, to stand as 
iree, but laboring manhood^ or womanhood^ in tlic 
higher ideal sense we give those ivords, apart from all questions 
of property or color or occupation. lie has shown that a 
e is nol inly an) - wiser for choosing its bobbin boys 

or tanner-boys or rail-splitters tor highest functions than for 
choosing its nun of literary taste and professional culture. A 
riii, inn, i! us may well be taken from the fields ot toil; but we 

ie presidential working-man whose " policy " would have 



*7 

doomed a toiling race to perpetual degradation. I have seen 
somewhere the assertion that close relations to the life of labor- 
ing men would have made Mr. Sumner a more practical states- 
man ; and that none of the great measures he initiated were 
finally passed in the form in which he proposed them. But is 
not this the lot of every one who proposes great measures to 
the councils of a nation ? And is there any practical power 
greater than the insight and the courage to point out the sub- 
stantial duty of every hour and compel the attention which it 
demands ? Judged by such tests, this was the most practical 
statesmanship of our day; more democratic than labor itself; 
more productive, because productive in a higher sense, than 
manufactories and shops and railroads and farms. Nor can we 
overestimate the educational value of a career that so perfectly 
vindicates the fitness of the largest culture to represent the in- 
terests of the people and the meaning of the state. It is the 
pledge that Free Labor in America shall be no blind war on 
ideas, intuitions, faiths ; that its protest against monopoly shall 
mean welcome to integral culture, to broadest disciplines, to 
every unity of wisdom, beauty, justice, love ; that its liberties 
shall be constructive — endowing the whole human capacity 
with the natural sacredness of self-accountability and self-respect ; 
that its religion shall be no enforced labor-creed, but the largest 
personal aspiration, guarded by the most perfect personal liberty 
to think, to deny, to believe, to aspire. To make religion thus 
natural, human, secular, free of interference by the state, yet 
the inspiration of all equity, humanity and progress in the state, 
is a function of the emancipation of labor. The great life that 
has closed would have been here, too, a tower of strength and 
light. Side by side with the prophets of religious liberty he has 
labored for the rights that prepare its way. 

How strange the coincidences of death ! The same hour 
sees the last obsequies of the most prominent endorser of the 



r8 

Fugitive S I and those of the senator of Human Liberty. 

How slight these fortuitous relations of death beside the essen- 
ce immortal, unities of life ! In the communion of this 
one man's wide attractions for the best meet all the illustrious 
buildei ur generation, living and departed, on both sides 

:ean and the grave, — Mazzini and Castelar, and Bright 
and Cobden, and the saintly or heroic lives our own eyes have 
seen and our grateful hearts enshrined. Especially do I remem- 
ber here that Charles Sumner and Theodore Parker were one in 
. and that their names are forever blended in the secret 
s of our faith in righteousness, in humanity, in God. Around 
this hallowed dust the saints, and prophets, and scholars, and 
., and philanthropists of Massachusetts will gather, with sor- 
rowing children of that race for, which he lived and cli jel, to learn 
holy the bond which unites them to each other, and all to 
the purpose shrined so long in that noble form they shall see no 
more. And they will take the silent vow, as one man, to make 
this unity a power to redeem their State to the great standard 
of public virtue that has gone before. 

For Charles Sumner was great as a Senator of New England, 

with the power and love of Massachusetts at his back, and her 

ieni e within him, to enforce the liberties that spring 

forth in the Mayflower exile's track by force of nature and power 

1 b.w she lias honored him ! Twice she hastened to do 

him justice ; when, in [862, she suppressed the effort to unseat 

him for his fidelity to her principles; and again, and not too 

n she made her own record concerning him clear. His 

rd is hers, her little leaven leavening the mighty 

n. In his -rand personality are incarnated her schools, her 

. 5, her practical morality, her intelligent knowl- 

and duties -I m. in. 1 1 is lor her living gen- 

1 in their stewardship of this matchless 

risibility to her to whose history and purpose it 



19 

of right belongs. It is for them to see that the vacant place, 
where cluster her holiest traditions, shall be filled only by her 
purest, largest, most unimpeachable virtue, by her most honored 
name. May the spirit of her great Senator enter into their 
hearts, that she may find hands and voice to rebuke every politi- 
cal aspiration that cannot bear the test of this pure ideal, this 
self-abandonment to duty, to country, to mankind ! 

We go out mourning, bearing precious seed. Still tarries the 
dawn for which we long, and the burden presses heavily of the 
silent dead. But remember that this immortal spirit has not 
ceased, and will not cease to answer, as it has so long answered, 
our ceaseless question, "Watchman, what of the night ?" And 
we, if we will listen, shall hear again, and yet again, that voice, 
as of a trumpet, saying : " Fear not ye, the morning cometh ! " 
And new consecration shall bring consolation and victory and 

joy. 

" For God's truth and mercy stand, 

Past and present and to be, 

Like the years of his right hand — 

Like his own eternity." 



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